Canucks Love Wii

An article is up on globeandmail.com citing Nintendo's unexpected successes with the Wii in the most important of regions, Canada. Nintendo Canada won't make an official statement regarding the exact number of units sold, but they were able to say that they did not expect the massive sell out of the Wii that they saw at the country's largest retailers.

Nintendo is scrambling to deal with the shortages of Wiis everywhere. Beginning this Thursday and Friday, stores across Canada will begin receiving their second shipments of Wii units. It has been projected that retailers should be receiving up to 50% of their launch day shipments, which would make 25-40 Wiis at most major retail locations.

"We're struggling to try and find a solution to a situation in which demand has far outstripped supply," says Pierre-Paul Trepanier of Nintendo Canada. "The expectation was that within a few days (after launch) Nintendo would still be [in] stock everywhere." Trepanier did confirm that despite the fact that demand is currently far outstripping supply, the company is still on track to ship 4 million units worldwide by the end of 2006. With a little more than one million of those consoles hitting North America, it seems that interest in the console outside the hardcore gaming circle has been much broader than Nintendo could have hoped for.